I'm trying to track down the history of a specific card principle within card-to-impossible-location effects. The idea is that the back of an indifferent card is used to insinuate that the effect is completed, whereupon the magician, in apparently fetching the card, introduces the actual signed selection.

The earliest I can find is with the Grippo/Carlyle Homing Card, late 1940s. The stuff that I've found earlier usually has shenanigans involving a stranger card or dupe or contraption of some sort.

Is there an earlier reference I need to be hunting down? I mean, I'm happy to just reference Grippo and Carlyle, but if there's something earlier, I'd be mucho obligeado to learn of it.

Forget my C.O. Williams mention, I was confusing it with the trick below.

In the Encyclopedia of Card tricks, published in 1937, someone named S.H. Wimbrough published "Card to Pocket - Another Presentation"

In that trick, an X card is shown at the beginning of the trick and put into the pocket without showing its face. A card is selected and winds up being the card that was previously placed into the pocket.

Tarbell and Wimbrough both have this idea of a card already in the pocket becoming the selected card from somewhere else. I think it's a bit different than what happens later with Grippo/Carlyle, though, since the effect claim isn't exactly a straight teleportation, but rather sort of a mysterious transformation -- like, it's less about the path the object takes, and more raising the possibility that the object must have been hallucinated at the original juncture. Maybe not overtly, but it's definitely not as obvious as something like coins across. Dunno if the Hofzinser idea fits that mould as well.

For the R.W. Hull trick, AA doesn't give more than the first couple of paragraphs, so I couldn't tell if the bluff call is followed up with an actual production of the card.

I guess my main interest is that the strategy of having an indifferent item and switching it out for the actual item to effect a straight-up unambiguous teleportation shows up in a bunch of more modern stuff, but I can't seem to find it in anything older than Grippo/Carlyle.

Hofzinser has another thing that is rather brilliant. Three double backers are in a handkerchief. The handkerchief is held by the spectator, who at the right time opens it. The double backers drops to the table. The do, naturally, land face down. But it seems accidental, the might as well have landed face-up. They are then switched before they are turned over.See here for a contemporary handling: http://www.conjuringarchive.com/list/bo ... ight=51166

The Burnaby Kid wrote:... the strategy of having an indifferent item and switching it out for the actual item to effect a straight-up unambiguous teleportation shows up in a bunch of more modern stuff, but I can't seem to find it in anything older than Grippo/Carlyle.

Hofzinser - Three Powers - first phase (page 175 of the Dover paperback) - the performer clearly claims to make three cards vanish from the pack held by a volunteer and appear in his pocket. As Denis said, three cards are then shown produced from the pocket (in this case they rise/pop out of the pocket) and they fall to the floor - conveniently face down thanks to .

The selections (three in this routine) are not in the pack because ... and this might sound familiar as regards a routine where one card is selected or thought of ... another useful principle or two is applied.

The Burnaby Kid wrote:So, some of these are new to me, so thanks, I appreciate it!

There seem to be a few things here that come pretty close.

Tarbell and Wimbrough both have this idea of a card already in the pocket becoming the selected card from somewhere else. I think it's a bit different than what happens later with Grippo/Carlyle, though, since the effect claim isn't exactly a straight teleportation, but rather sort of a mysterious transformation -- like, it's less about the path the object takes, and more raising the possibility that the object must have been hallucinated at the original juncture. Maybe not overtly, but it's definitely not as obvious as something like coins across. Dunno if the Hofzinser idea fits that mould as well.

I don't think the presentational frame and the timing of the reveal changes the fact that it is the same basic method.

If you perform a coins across, for example, its a teleportation. But if you do the same coins across routine, while holding one hand above a table and one below, now the same method is penetration through the table.

Its a case of rearranged timing here to make a different effect. But you are still showing an X card at some point in your pocket and then switching it for the selection with a palm with both being in the context of a selection appearing in the pocket (albeit in slightly different presentation).

Jonathan Townsend wrote:Hofzinser - Three Powers - first phase (page 175 of the Dover paperback) - the performer clearly claims to make three cards vanish from the pack held by a volunteer and appear in his pocket. As Denis said, three cards are then shown produced from the pocket (in this case they rise/pop out of the pocket) and they fall to the floor - conveniently face down thanks to .

The selections (three in this routine) are not in the pack because ... and this might sound familiar as regards a routine where one card is selected or thought of ... another useful principle or two is applied.

Ryan Matney wrote:I don't think the presentational frame and the timing of the reveal changes the fact that it is the same basic method.

Oh yeah, absolutely. In my case, though, the principle that I'm trying to establish the lineage of (for the thing I'm writing up) specifically involves teleportations. An analogy might be like trying to figure out who was the first person to realize that an Invisible Deck could be used to demonstrate Triumph.